Wednesday, 31 December 2008

Where's a feminist when you need one?

Sati is a ghastly Indian tradition whereby a widow is slowly burnt to death as part of her husband’s funeral ritual. Naturally enough, a widower doesn’t have to do the same should his wife pre-decease him. The cruelty and barbarism of this is almost indescribable, and it’s hard to imagine a ‘cultural’ practice, anywhere, any time, more reprehensible.

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In many ways it’s the ultimate in anti-feminism. It was outlawed by the British early on in the Raj, and they strung up anyone they found guilty of enforcing it.

Now Maya Jasanoff is a tenured Humanities Professor at Harvard, and you can't get deeper into the PC/feminist fever-swamp than that. And ipso facto, you couldn’t find anyone anywhere more opposed to the likes of sati.

Well, you could, actually.

Writing in the current issue of the New York Review Of Books she has this to say. “Seen in one light, the abolition of sati looks like a model for more recent crusades such as the ‘liberation’ [her inverted commas] of Afghan women from the Taliban or the campaign against female circumcision. In its own times however, the abolition of sati, welcome as it was by a small, vocal constituency[my emphasis] of Indian reformers… formed part of a cultural and legislative shift that imposed British ‘civilisation’ [her inverted commas] on the Indians.”

Can you fucking credit that?

The outlawing of probably the most heinous anti-woman practice the world has known is seen as imposing so-called civilization on the noble savage. It just goes to show that feminists will prioritise non-Western ‘cultures’ at all times, even when women are the main victims of such cultures, as the booming silence from them of the anti-women practices of Islam testify.

Truly, the West’s culture and civilization are doomed when the people who should most appreciate them hate them as much as they do. Who's left to defend them?

12 comments:

Not to worry. These academic radical feminists don't represent the majority of feminists. More typical would be Sarah Palin or me, women who've benefited from the improved status of women without going off the rails.

Once upon a time people as dumb as a fence post did not get into Harvard but this was found to discrimnate against people who were as dumb as a bag of hammers and so Barry Hussein Soetero was given a piece of paper that said that he was equal to people who could pass their exams.

Capitalism is an art form, an Apollonian fabrication to rival nature. It is hypocritical for feminists and intellectuals to enjoy the pleasures and conveniences of capitalism while sneering at it. Everyone born into capitalism has incurred a debt to it. Give Caesar his due.

Anti-racist is anti-white and multi-culturalism is to destroy Western culture.